DREAMERS

Dreamers ($9.95 paperback original; May 30,1996; 128 pp.; 0-8112-1321-8). A short novel, previously unpublished here, by the 1920 Nobel Prize-winning author, chronicles the commercial and sexual dynamics among inhabitants of a Norwegian fishing village—a town that muddles along under the paternalistic thumb of a wealthy fisherman who carries himself as his people's savior. In Hamsun's post-Edenic world, nobody is quite the man he thinks he is, and everybody gets his comeuppance—even the story's phlegmatic central figure Rolandsen, the local telegraph operator, willful eccentric, and romantic egoist, as well as close kin to the imperturbably alienated antiheroes of such classics as Hunger and Mysteries. Minor Hamsun, but skillfully fashioned and charming.